Critical discourse analysis and nominalization: problem or pseudo-problem?

Transcription

1 DEBATE Van Dijk: CDA and nominalization: problem or pseudo-problem? 821 Critical discourse analysis and nominalization: problem or pseudo-problem? TEUN A. VAN DIJK POMPEU FABRA UNIVERSITY, SPAIN Discourse & Society Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Vol 19(6): / ABSTRACT This reply to Billig s article emphasizes that, as for all discourse, one should not only analyse texts, but also their contexts. The issue is not the primary use or abuse of nominalization or any other feature of discourse in CDA, but the study of the systematic abuse of discursive power by hiding the negative role of elite actors and the consequences of such discourse properties on the mental models of the recipients. CDA scholars do not study nominalizations in isolation, but within the text and context of the discourses studied critically. Of course they know that nominalizations have many other functions beyond these forms of obfuscation. If CDA itself uses nominalizations in its analytical discourse it does so like any scientific discourse. Because in this case there is no question of hiding the negative role of powerful actors, Billig s criticism is pointless, and creates a pseudo-problem. Finally a psychological basis for the description of nominalization is supplied, as Billig expects, but such an explanation cannot be provided by discursive psychology (DP), contrary to what Billig suggests, because DP explicitly rejects such cognitive analyses of language use. KEY WORDS: CDA, cognitive processing, context, context models, critical discourse analysis, discourse production, ideology, mental models, nominalization, power Introduction Michael Billig criticizes some scholars in critical discourse analysis (CDA) for their abuse of the notion of nominalization in their discourse analyses. He argues that when CDA scholars examine such uses of language by others, they should be more self-critical and avoid using nominalizations themselves. The question is: does he have a case? Are such uses in CDA a real problem? I think not. Let me briefly summarize why I think he is actually creating a pseudo-problem. Before doing so, I wish to stress that even more than other approaches to discourse, CDA should, of course, also be self-critical of its own use of academic language. CDA is not a theory or a method of research, but an academic

2 822 Discourse & Society 19(6) movement of scholars specifically interested in the analysis of fundamental social problems, such as the discursive reproduction of illegitimate domination. This obviously implies that scholars who claim to engage in CDA should also critically examine their own academic discourse, because as academics they have power, if only theoretical, analytical and ideological power, over the minds of students. In this brief reaction, I shall hardly comment on the technical (linguistic) discussion of nominalization, as presented by Billig. Only at the end shall I summarize my own theory of the sociocognitive processes involved in discourse production. When is the use of nominalizations criticized in CDA? Whatever the exact technical definition and analysis of nominalization, the point is that many CDA scholars sometimes use the notion to criticize the language use of powerful authors (speakers, writers, media and other symbolic institutions and organizations). For example, CDA scholars may criticize powerful authors in that their use of nominalizations may hide the agency or responsibility for (especially negative) action by elite actors and organizations. The standard examples are news or government reports which may be interpreted (for example by critical scholars or victims) to hide or mitigate the role of the police in (what they call) the harassment of black youths or immigrants, or in violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators. Conversely, the use of active sentences without nominalizations in which, for example, the police is the grammatical subject, sentence topic and semantic agent may then be interpreted as not mitigating such a role, or even as emphasizing it for example, by putting such an active sentence in the headline. That is, we should never study the role of nominalization in discourse in isolation but always in comparison to possible alternative structures. Whether or not nominalizations are described as transformations of verbs, as the mental processes of authors, or in any other theoretical terms, is irrelevant in that case, but I have some more to say about that later. To understand Billig s criticism of CDA research, it is crucial to examine, as always, not only its academic texts but also its contexts. Of course, CDA scholars do not vilify the mere use of nominalizations, which as any linguist knows are ubiquitous in many types of formal text and talk. Their aim is to critically analyse the details of discursive domination, for example, by means of the use of specific nominalizations by specific elite authors, and in specific contexts that may be used to express and convey a distorted view of social events, namely the obfuscation of the problematic role of powerful actors in society. Such a biased representation, especially in public discourse (of the symbolic elites in politics, media, science, education, corporations, etc.), is especially problematic because it may influence the way citizens represent social events. CDA criticism is premised on the norm that citizens get the best possible information from the symbolic elites. Hiding or downplaying the reprehensible role of (for example) the police in a demonstration or the control of immigrants and

3 Van Dijk: CDA and nominalization: problem or pseudo-problem? 823 minorities may be considered an infringement of the rights of citizens to be ade-quately informed about the State, its agencies, and other powerful actors that affect the everyday lives of those citizens. In other words, public discourse that systematically hides or mitigates the negative actions of powerful social actors is professionally inappropriate, socially misleading and ethically wrong, and hence a form of discursive power abuse. Nominalizations may be abused as a form of manipulation, as mind control. This, and not the technical discussion of nominalization or its uses, is the real problem for CDA scholars. CDA is interested primarily in illegitimate uses of language. Sometimes, the systematic use of nominalizations when employed to hide forms of domination is indeed illegitimate. Is the use of nominalizations in CDA discourse a problem? For Billig s criticism to apply to CDA itself, according to the norms just formulated, he would have to show that (many or most of) the nominalizations used in CDA discourse are a form of power abuse. This would imply, for example, that by using nominalizations in their analyses, CDA scholars are hiding or mitigating the negative agency of powerful authors. Of course, in principle this may be the case, as it is in academic discourse in general as happened in the academic legitimation of racism, sexism and class domination throughout the history of science. However, I am not aware of any such systematic abuses of an analytical instrument. It goes without saying that any biased application of a theoretical notion in CDA analyses would be wrong and in need of critical self-analysis. This may be the case, for example, if nominalizations used by a right-wing newspaper were criticized, but not those in a left-wing newspaper under the same conditions, namely if this is to hide the bad things of powerful social actors. Billig does not offer such data of the systematic abuse of the notion of nominalization in CDA analyses. That CDA itself uses nominalizations, as is the case in most academic texts, is nothing special, and would only be a problem under the conditions mentioned earlier, namely when such nominalizations are abused to protect the elites. I conclude that the critical study of nominalizations in CDA analyses, or its own uses of nominalizations, is hardly a serious problem, if it is a problem at all. Actually, I think it is a pseudo-problem. CDA research has many other fundamental, theoretical, methodological and applied problems that need to be resolved. One of these is the lack of theory about the norms and principles of its own critical activity, that is, a detailed applied ethics that allows CDA scholars to judge whether discourses or discourse properties, or their users, are bad because they violate fundamental human rights. Another is the lack of integrating discursive, social and cognitive analyses in critical analyses. Obviously, in order to critically apply the notion of nominalization, analysts need to be aware of what they are doing. No leading scholar in CDA sustains that the mere use of nominalizations is bad. Actually, I have myself explicitly warned

4 824 Discourse & Society 19(6) against overly superficial interpretations and analyses of nominalizations in a paper on discourse and ideology. Let me cite this paragraph in full: IDEOLOGICAL (OVER-)INTERPRETATION Discourse structures have many cognitive, interactional and social functions. None of them are exclusively ideological. For example, passive sentences and nominalizations hide or background agency. This may have an ideological function in an otherwise ideologically biased text and context for example, to mitigate our agency and responsibility for negative actions, thus implementing locally the overall ideological discourse strategy of positive self-presentation of ingroups. However, we should be careful not to over-interpret discourse data. Often passive sentences and nominalizations are used when agents are unknown, when they have just been mentioned and should not be repeated, or when the current focus is on other participants such as the victims of violent actions rather than on the actors. This means that such data should never be described in isolation, but in relation to the text (co-text) as a whole and in relation to the context who is speaking to whom, when, and with what intention. Most importantly, also theoretically, is to realize that discourse is not just to express or reproduce ideologies. People do many other things with words at the same time. (Van Dijk, 2006) In this paragraph, I stress that such a critical analysis should examine not only the syntactic structures of text or talk, but also its contexts, such as the relations between a right-wing newspaper and a political right that defends an ideology of law and order in which, for example, our police is always our best friend, no matter what. Also, such analyses of the abuse of nominalizations should be based not on single examples, but should be shown to be a systematic practice of a powerful author. Towards a sociocognitive theory of discourse (and nominalization) Finally, a technical point. Billig discusses at length the nature of nominalizations, and claims that many uses of the terms in CDA studies are confused or misguided and fail to analyse the details of the linguistic transformations or the cognitive processes involved in their production. As for the psychological study of processes of nominalization, he briefly mentions work by Paul Chilton, who has worked extensively on the cognitive basis of (political and other) discourse. However, Billig also cites the work of his colleagues at Loughborough University as an example of analyses that examine the psychological dimensions of discourse. Now that is quite surprising, because if there is one thing his colleagues in discursive psychology (an influential approach in social psychology) do not do it is speculate on the mental processes involved in discourse production. On the contrary, their methodological principle is to only examine text and talk itself, and for that reason their work may be interesting discourse analysis, but it does not contribute to the cognitive psychology of discourse processing.

5 Van Dijk: CDA and nominalization: problem or pseudo-problem? 825 If we really want to know about the cognitive processes involved in the production of nominalizations (and not in abstract linguistic operations such as transformations) then we need to examine what psycholinguistics and the cognitive psychology have to say about that. Early psycholinguistic study assumed that abstract linguistic transformations (like changing a verb into a noun) also have a psychological reality: that is, language users when speaking or writing start with a verbal concept (a process) and change it into a nominal concept (a thing) and one of the proofs would be that it takes them a fraction of a second longer to produce nominalized expressions than the verb from which they are supposed to be derived. Unfortunately, early psycholinguistics did not (yet) have a proper theory of discourse production or theory of the kind of mental (memory) representations that are being used in discourse production and comprehension. So, let me finish by briefly summarizing the contemporary theoretical framework that describes how discourse and nominalizations are produced. DISCOURSE PRODUCTION To illustrate the theoretical argument, let us simulate what happens when a journalist must cover, for example, the activities of the police during a demonstration. The first thing a journalist does when starting to write a news report is construe a mental representation of the current communicative situation in which she is writing the news report. This means that she must first represent herself (as Self) as the center of such a representation and her role of journalist and employee of such and such a newspaper, writing in a specific spatiotemporal setting, and with goals such as doing her job, satisfying her boss, and finally informing the public about an event defined as news by her editor. In other words, the journalist construes her own context model (personal interpretation) of the communicative situation. Such a (pragmatic) model will remain activated and constantly updated throughout the discourse, and controls all aspects of discourse in such a way that a news report is appropriate in that specific situation. Second, the journalist needs to have information or knowledge about the events she wants to cover in her news report. This information is stored in a mental model of the events, but this time it is a semantic model, consisting of a subjective representation of the event the author speaks or writes about. In other words, discourse is controlled by two types of mental models, a semantic one for the content of what will be said, and a pragmatic one that controls how what is said is situationally appropriate. Both mental model are based on (activate and apply) general social knowledge, as well as the ideologies of the journalist depending on her various social identities (groups she belongs to), for example, the professional knowledge and ideologies about news making, and more generally knowledge or ideologies of (for example) the police, immigrants or demonstrations. Journalists usually have much more information about an event in their mental model of an event than will fit in a news report. So in general, a journalist

6 826 Discourse & Society 19(6) will have to select what to include in the text, and what to leave implicit in the mental model. Moreover, most of what she knows about an event is shared (or can be inferred) by the readers, so that she need not to tell them that information (e.g. what a demonstration is, or what the police are). In other words, the context model (with information about the assumed shared knowledge of the readers) tells the journalist what she can leave implicit or presupposed in the news report. The context model also tells her for what kind of organization she is writing, and for what audience, what kind of discourse genre, and hence such context model not only selects relevant contents (from the semantic event model) for the news report, but also how these should be or can be expressed discursively so as to optimally adapt them to the communicative situation. PRODUCING NOMINALIZATIONS If we want to explain how nominalizations are used both by journalists and by CDA analysts we need more or less this kind of mental architecture, processes and representations, and much of this is standard theory in cognitive science. Journalists or other language users do not have mental models that represent events in terms of grammatical structures, but in some form of knowledge units (propositions, or mental networks, etc.) that are able to represent people in different roles (say as agents) as well as what they are doing, and how they do so, when and where. Part of the mental model of the news events is also the relations between the events, such as those of causation or reasons, as well as opinions and emotions about the event. Depending on her own ideology, and her attitudes (socially shared opinion structures) about the police, black youths or immigrants, the journalist may represent the event say a riot as caused or occasioned by the police rather than by black youths, or vice versa. Depending on her version of the facts as subjectively defined by the journalist in her mental model the production of discourse may or may not be biased. She may have an ideologically biased (semantic) mental model of the event, favouring the police or the minority version of what happened, but her (pragmatic) context model of news production may feature knowledge about what her editors prefer her to write, and she may well adapt her text to what is expected of her. It is at this point of discourse production that authors have more or less automatic options in the description of events and situations, as well as their actors and actions. Journalists are professional language users who know very well how to (de-)emphasize, more or less subtly, the responsible agency for the bad acts of one or more of the news actors. They may do so, for example, by the management of topic comment structures, focus, presuppositions and implications, headlines, macro-propositions, giving more or less detail of negative actions, or describing them in very general or vague terms or in very specific and precise terms. Mitigating responsible agency by the social actors referred to is thus a complex discourse strategy, controlled by context models of language users. In the (fractions of) seconds used to formulate a sentence, much of this production is

7 Van Dijk: CDA and nominalization: problem or pseudo-problem? 827 automatized. Yet, particularly when the general ideological perspective of the article is relevant (according to the context model), each word, each syntactic structure, may be carefully chosen, depending on the genre, production time (deadlines) and so on. It is at this point that passive or impersonal sentence structure or nominalizations may be used to describe action. This does not mean that an underlying verb is transformed by the language user, but that a nominalization is chosen directly from the lexicon as the obligatory, the shortest or the easiest way to describe the action. Nominalizations are always or mostly preferred if: the nominalization is generally the preferred or more common (lexically more accessible) description of an action (as in election, revolution, inflation, etc.); the author does not know who the agent is (as in car theft, pollution, etc.); knowledge about agency is irrelevant in the current context (as in the weather forecast); the agent has already been identified in the (con)text, or as part of the implications or implicatures of the text (as in demonstrators... the demonstration); the agent can be inferred from general knowledge about the action (as in elections: voters); the author momentarily does not want to focus on agents, but on actions or victims (as in the assassination of the president); there is lack of space, as in headlines, titles, slogans, etc. (as reform in Ministers back radical voting reform The Guardian, March 24, 2008); or, finally, the author wants to hide or downgrade the responsible negative agency of ingroup agents (as in discrimination against immigrants is increasing). In different discourse genres, defined by different context models, therefore, it may be more or less relevant to mention the agents of actions (as in conversations and news), and in others, such as scientific discourse, such agents may be unknown or abstract or natural processes. In other words, for each genre, we need to spell out what kinds of knowledge, what kinds of event models and what kinds of context models are involved in the description of the processes of syntactic (lexical, discursive) production. Thus, in order to be able to conclude that nominalization is used to hide or downplay the responsible agent of an action, one should, in principle, make sure that another of the conditions of nominalization is not more plausible in the current text and context. In sum, a theory of nominalization and its uses needs to be formulated in such a broad, multidisciplinary framework, combining cognitive, social and linguistic dimensions of analysis. Only then are we able to make explicit what (mental) processes are being used, which moves and strategies are being applied, and how linguistic formulation is controlled by underlying semantic and pragmatic models of language users, representing what they want to say, and how they should say it appropriately in the current communicative situation, and under the influence of what professional or other group ideologies.

8 828 Discourse & Society 19(6) For bibliographical references on nominalization, see the articles by Billig, Martin and Fairclough (this issue). For my own studies that have critically analysed the abuse of nominalizations, see especially Racism in the Press (London: Routledge, 1991), Elite Discourse and Racism (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE, 1993), and Ideology (London: SAGE, 1998). For the role of context models in discourse production, explaining how for example ideology may favour hiding responsible agents by nominalizations, as well as discourse control in communicative situations generally, see Discourse and Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). REFERENCE Van Dijk, T.A. (2006) Ideology and discourse analysis, Journal of Political Ideologies 11: TEUN A. VAN DIJK was Professor of Discourse Studies at the University of Amsterdam until 2004, and is at present Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. After earlier work on generative poetics, text grammar, and the psychology of text processing, his work since 1980 has taken a more critical perspective and deals with discursive racism, news in the press, ideology, knowledge and context. He is the author of several books in most of these areas, and founding editor of six international journals, Poetics, Text (now Text & Talk), Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies, Discourse & Communication and the internet journal in Spanish Discurso & Sociedad ( of which he still edits the latter four. His latest books are Discourse and Power (Palgrave, 2008), Discourse and Context and Society and Discourse (both Cambridge University Press, 2008). His most recent edited books are Discourse Studies (5 vols, SAGE, 2007), and Racismo y Discurso en América Latina (Gedisa, 2007, to appear in English with Lexington Books in 2008). For further publications, see his website